Turning Point – 1

This book came as a result of a wet North Coast NSW Australian winter and a damaged knee. My wife, Tricia, and I trawled through the 40 year old black and white negatives and colour transparencies. They’d been tucked away in boxes all that time; unopened, unseen. As we scanned in the negatives we realised we had stumbled upon a surfing anthropological find; a dusty archive of images depicting some of the most significant, interesting and creative characters in the history of surfing. Most of these photos have not been seen before, nor their stories told: Wayne Lynch at Lennox while on the run from the draft, rebels Miki Dora and Russell Hughes on the fence in Byron (what were they talking about?) and big south swells rolling by. These are one-off shots taken in a simpler time when there weren’t many people taking photographs. They are of a period remembered as pure and uncomplicated.